Are you Swiss cheese?
We’re emotional beings and everything is energy. How we choose to interact with the energy around us and within us is an important concept to ponder. Here’s a dharma talk from this past Wednesday’s class for you.
These past few days, this past week has been an observation of how we exchange energy. We’re very energetic and emotional beings. The very floor, the mat, the pillows, the room, everything is made up of energy. And we’re always exchanging that energy between us and the objects, and the animals, the plants, the sky above us, the earth below us. There’s this always infinite exchange of energy. And as we’ve probably noticed with covid, a lot of times the energy can feel very heavy, very down, and at the same time very swirly and ungrounding.
The emotional energy that one person has can be translated to another. Some of us are a little more spongy, you might even think of it as kinda like swiss cheese, where you allow the energy of those around you to move into your internal container and reverberate, bounce around, and stir up some muckiness that you don’t necessarily want to see or feel.
There’s this idea of creating a strong and sturdy container so that you can choose what is the energy, whether it’s emotional, physical, mental energy in general, from your external environment, what do you allow in, and then what do you allow to press out or permeate out beyond that container? Just like the ebb and flow of the space around with the objects and the people and the things, you also have the ability to damn up or control or completely open the flood gates.
There are times when we are really open and there are times when we are really closed, and so I invite you to explore where are you now from your energy. Do you feel as if you’re closed off, or sheltered or protected, especially through the heart space? Do you feel as if you’re open and expansive and everything is just this fluid dance of energy dancing back and forth or are you some space in between?
No matter where you are, exploring does it serve you? Does the being completely wide open or a sponge or a piece of swiss cheese serve you? Does the being closed completely off and walled off so you don’t feel anything support your best self? No matter where you are, can you invite yourself back into the middle ground, back into that sweet spot of allowing the energy flow to/from internal/external, being proactive vs. reactive, choosing your level of engagement?